The Consumer Electronics Madness

Three old men are the reason I haven’t written a word here when I should have written a lot of them. Our country is so kind and generous to kids that we don’t have just one gift party here (Santa, which is called Papá Noel over here and pays a visit at Christmas day), but two. The Three Wise Men (also known as The Three Kings or Magi, which are called Los Reyes Magos here) come every January 6th to give every child some more Christmas presents and complete this crazy and fantastic holidays.

There is one problem, though: The Three Wise Men don’t care about CES, and CES doesn’t care about The Three Wise Men. If you’ve got kids, there’s no option: these are their (second) days, and you can’t fail them.

That’s the reason I haven’t been able to write, but even if I had tried I’d probably failed. And I would have because it has been another crazy CES with a ton of things to talk about. Several well known sites have done a great work with their coverage -The Verge has been specially great combining short and long stories- and the story is the same year over year.

There are too many vendors, too many products and too many promises. We can’t pay attention to most of them.

I remember a column from BuzzFeed three years ago. In ‘Why We’re Not At The Biggest Tech Show In The World‘ Mat Buchanan lamented this little circus the CES has become. Industry and press should do better: instead of squeezing so many product launches and try to steal journalists attention (and audience attention) from each other, it would be wiser to distribute that madness, to lighten it, to spread out the magic.

I will for sure talk about some of the products that have been launched in the past few days later on. For now I just wanted to take a little breath and enjoy a little silence. There’s too much noise at CES. Too much madness.

Javier Pastor is a technology journalist that has been writing about tech since 1999. He started writing for PC Actual in Spain, the leading printed magazine in the country, and in 2006 started to write online. First as the Chief Editor for The Inquirer ES, and after that for MuyComputer until 2013. That year he became senior editor at Xataka, the leading tech news website in Spanish with over 5M uniques/month (Aug'15, comScore). Xataka is part of Weblogs SL, a blog network that gets over 40M uniques/month and that has a wide catalog of publications in Spanish.
The Unshut is his new venture and allows him to express his opinions and thoughts on everything touched by technology, and follows what he has been doing at Incognitosis, his personal blog, since 2005.